


Take It Out

by hauntedjaeger (saellys)



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Background fHAnders, Gen, Grief/Mourning, POV Second Person, Post-All That Remains, Torture, Triggers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-07
Updated: 2016-05-07
Packaged: 2018-06-06 21:31:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6770983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saellys/pseuds/hauntedjaeger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one tells you how to mourn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Take It Out

**Author's Note:**

> Do you guys think it's weird that you can get a scene where you beat up a random dude in your library for telling thieves about Hubert's shipments, but Gascard DuPuis only warrants a quick exchange in Darktown? No? Just me? Okay.

The morning after your mother died, you sit on the bench in the entryway with a blanket around your shoulders, and gaze dully at the cellar door. The house is quiet. Your fingers bear ink stains. Grey light struggles through the high windows.

Presently you hear them through the door, but only because they’re not trying to sneak up on you. “... all these damn stairs,” Isabela murmurs, “but at least I can’t complain about the view.”

You ease the door open on hinges you stayed up oiling, and she backs in, carrying the upper half of an unconscious Orlesian. Fenris follows with the lower half, and hands you the key. Library, you mouth, and they nod, proceed silently across the parlor. You hang the key where it belongs on the staff by the door.

“Happy Satinalia,” Isabela whispers when the library door is closed. It’s half a joke, but she doesn’t smile, and neither do you when you thank her and hand her the rope. There’s no fire in the hearth; you move by the light of the lamps on the upper floor. Fenris gets the hard-backed chair from the desk, and you take the plush one in the corner, turn it around.

“Will you be overheard?” Fenris asks.

Soon enough the Hightown festivities will drown out any noise from inside the estate. You’re about to explain that Anders is still abed when you hear him on the stairs, and raise a finger. Fenris and Isabela nod, and you adjust the blanket, hold it tighter at your collar, and shut the library door behind you.

“There you are,” he says. He looks you over while he buckles his coat. “I need to go to the clinic, just for a few hours.”

A momentary conflict: you can ask him to stay. It’s not that you want him to see this, but you can’t appear too eager to have him out the door. You wouldn’t even have to say anything. If you lower your eyes and look miserable he will step into you, hold your head to his shoulder. Give you a face full of feathers and an ear full of regret, and then he’ll go anyway.

But he carries an apology in his eyes (as ever). You needn’t give him more guilt. Protect him from that like you’re protecting him from knowing. You lift your chin. “I’ll be all right.”

Anders looks at you for another breath. “Yes, you will,” he says, and presses his lips to your brow.

You watch him take his key and staff and go through the cellar, and then you shed the blanket on your way back into the library. Your armor doesn’t shine. Last night you waxed the straps, but you didn’t clean the steel. Blood and ichor dried on your breastplate.

You left notes bidding Bodahn and Orana to take the day off. They padded out early with Sandal, and on their way Orana inclined her head like she understood your reasons. She left porridge and dark bread in the kitchen, and you’re grateful. This will be hungry work.

In the library, Gascard DuPuis is bound to the hard-backed chair, facing away from the door. You regard his bowed head, his stillness. The room has begun to smell like Isabela’s flasks. “Thank you for attending to this so quickly,” you say to Fenris. You slipped the note and the key under his door four hours ago.

“He wasn’t exactly hiding,” Fenris replies. At the desk Isabela sorts through what DuPuis had in his pockets. You don’t stop her from taking the gold, but she hands you something small, and you look at it and think it will do for a start.

“You don’t need to stay for this, Isabela.”

“Mmm. Much as I’d like to, I do have other plans today.” You walk her to the front door, where she touches your arm. “Whatever happens, remember: you stopped him. He’s never going to hurt anyone else.”

 _A woman goes missing_ , she said once, back when you should have been paying attention, _and you’ll either never find her, or you’ll just find her body._ A woman goes missing and for three years no one cares except one bloody templar.

You bolt the door behind her. Outside, already, there is a parade.

“Do you wish me to leave as well?” Fenris has taken post just inside the library door.

“I’m going to need your help.” You wait, to see if he understands. Of course he does. You have asked this of him before, though not with this much premeditation.

And then DuPuis begins to rouse, and you go to the corner chair. You sit canted in it.

“I knew a man,” you say when you are certain he has his wits about him and some concept of where he is, “who had enough sense to realize he was twisted beyond hope. He ran and waited for death to find him, and it did. But here you are, still in Kirkwall, as if no one is looking for you. I suppose that’s the difference between you and someone who feels shame.”

An Orlesian noble goes missing...

“Hawke,” DuPuis breathes. “I couldn’t have known he would go after your mother.”

Don’t bristle yet. You will let him see you angry, later. It’s going to be a long day. “It doesn’t matter whose mother she was. Eventually either you or Quentin would have taken someone whose family didn’t give up.” You produce the portrait he carried. It fits in your palm. “Who was she?”

“A woman I… experimented on.”

“Her name.”

“I don’t know.” The fact that he doesn’t even try to make one up is a testament to how dead he knows he is.

“You cut her?” A nod. “And killed her. And then?” Painted her portrait, with life in her eyes and the hint of a smile on her lips, and carried it as a reminder and a convenient prop.

“I tried to bring her back, but.” He swallows air.

“But you’re an amateur,” you supply. “An incompetent sack of shit who aspired to proper villainy and stood there helpless while her body cooled, and all without so much as bothering to learn her name.”

The sobs might be genuine. “I am so sorry.”

“You’re not. Yet.” You place the portrait on the corner table. It watches him.

“I don’t think you intend to do me serious harm, Hawke. Not in a room so fine as this.” He actually tries to smile at you, as if you can’t afford to have the tile cleaned.

“I won’t spill your blood. That’s why Fenris is here.”

Gascard’s lips form the beginning of who? as Fenris steps into place behind him. Blue-white light flashes, and you close your eyes--not against the brightness, but so you can focus on the sound of DuPuis screaming, shrill as a piper.

“That pain you feel is just the beginning, mage.”

Once, up Sundermount, you took an arrow in the gap under your pauldron, and the head broke off when you tried to pull it out. Fenris’s hand hurt more than being shot, searing every nerve while he tried to take it out. Insult added to injury.

It would be better, maybe, if DuPuis was making that sound at your hands, but you meant what you said about not spilling his blood. You won’t give him any opportunity to cast a spell and free himself.

You open your eyes. Fenris twists something. DuPuis strains against the ropes, whines, “What do you want from me?” You don’t answer, so he tells you things. “I lied,” he says, like this is new or useful to you. He gives you a list of names you already know. He watched Quentin for a long time, longer than anyone else was paying attention. After that he goes back further, cataloguing his own sins, the women and before them the animals. As a child he dissected a cat and tried to resurrect it.

Mostly to stop him talking about that, you say, “What was the point of all of this?”

“Power,” DuPuis says like it’s obvious.

You lift your gaze to meet Fenris’s. There are wants you understand. A warm bed and a warm smile, a horizon to chase in a solid ship, a pretty girl and a decent meal, money, fame, the respect of your kin. Freedom. Revenge. All solid, concrete ideas, things you can hunger for.

The abstraction of power, and the way it warps everything… you hope you’ll never understand that. Perhaps it’s the sort of want you can only have if there’s mana in your veins--

No, that isn’t true. Ordinary people go mad for it too, and every day thousands of mages, even blood mages, don’t. Fenris’s eyes burn with an unspoken I told you so, and you look away again.

“I didn’t bring you here to tell me your life story,” you say, and now, finally, DuPuis looks at you with fear.

“Messere, please--”

At your nod Fenris drives the claws of his gauntlet through the back of the chair and into DuPuis’s vitals. The mage shrieks. You savor it for a minute, then lift a hand and Fenris lets go at once. “There’s only one name I want to hear you say,” you tell DuPuis.

There are tears on his cheeks, and a string of spittle hangs from his lips, but when he looks up at you again, the fear has passed. All that remains is hate. DuPuis says, “Bethany.”

You are on your feet so fast the chair rocks back. DuPuis’s grin distorts from pain. “If I wanted her, it would be a simple matter. A bribe, a templar’s turned head. There would be no trail to follow.”

You’re not sure when you draw your dagger, but Fenris is faster. Before you can strike his fingers emerge from DuPuis’s chest, flickering between solidity and vapor.

DuPuis howls; the sound grows weak and then dies away until all that’s left is a harsh breath, which tapers off in the same moment that he slumps forward against the ropes.

“Alas,” Fenris says.

Too soon. You wanted this to last hours.

Slowly you unclench your free hand, sheath your dagger. Take a deep breath through your nose. “I’ll be back soon,” you say, watching DuPuis’s slack face and vacant eyes. “If he moves, kill him again.”

You walk past Fenris, out of the library. You descend the stairs through the cellar. You get Anders.

He follows you without question, assuming from your armor that it’s an emergency. Inside the library he stops short, takes in the sight of Fenris in your chair, opposite a lifeless Orlesian.

You have an response ready for anything he might say, but before he says anything, he sighs. Weary, but not surprised. He sighs the same whenever you charge into a mob you could have just avoided, and then he patches you up and burns the corpses to ash. Cleans up after you. “What is this?”

You put the answer in your eyes: this is what happens to people who hurt someone you love. “You were right last night. I was looking for someone to be angry at.” Take it out on me he said, but even then, at your angriest, that wasn’t a solution. “I think he’s in shock. Can you bring him around?”

Anders stands over DuPuis and presses two fingers to his neck, looks him over for wounds. “If you want to inflict pain without accidentally disconnecting his innards, go for the face,” he says, to you or Fenris or both. Meeting your eyes, he adds, “This won’t last long.” You shrug.

He puts one hand on DuPuis’s chest, and the blood mage’s body jolts with an electric charge. DuPuis starts to hack.

You move to take Anders’s place. He stands close to the door. Fenris rises from your chair and returns to the spot behind DuPuis. You crouch, elbows on knees, so you can look up at DuPuis’s face. He opens his eyes just enough to see that it’s still you, and then closes them with a groan.

“My mother’s name was Leandra. Say it.”

“Leandra,” he echoes, hoarse.

“When she was younger than me, she got pregnant, and broke off a betrothal with an Orlesian noble to run away with an apostate. She wouldn’t have described it so bluntly; she told her story like it was the height of romance. She regretted nothing. I always wondered, though, what sort of life she might have had if it weren’t for me.

“It’s a simplistic way of looking at things--I know life isn’t that straightforward. I can’t say that if you hadn’t cut up a cat when you were young, we would never have ended up in this situation. Maybe you’d still be a sick, vicious, murdering shit. Maybe my mother would have married the Comte and stayed in Kirkwall and Quentin would have found her anyway, and no one would have held her hand when she died.”

“Messere…”

“I can’t change what happened, but some things are straightforward. I blamed myself because I was too late to save her,” you say. “I was too late because you lied.”

You stand, and move around the chair, and for once DuPuis has nothing to say. You put one hand under his jaw and one on the back of his head, and twist.

After he’s dead, your dagger shears through the rope, and DuPuis’s body falls forward out of the chair. There’s no blood. Nothing to clean up. You move him to the fireplace. Before you can ask, Anders strikes the tip of his staff on the floor, and the flames spring up.

An Orlesian noble goes missing, and no one will ever find a trace of him.

Fenris watches, then looks to you. You find it difficult to speak, so you nod your thanks, and he pads away. When the front door closes behind him, Anders crosses to your side, and waits.

DuPuis’s body is already half ash, the fire hot as a forge. “I have to go to the Gallows,” you tell Anders.

“Give yourself a day to r--”

“ _Please_.” You have to see her. To make sure no templars’ heads have been turned. You won’t sleep with that thought in your head, even though DuPuis only said it to goad you. “I have to tell her.”

Anders looks in your eyes, and lets out a sigh.

Somewhere in the catacombs beneath the tower you wait while mages whisper and dodge patrols, and then your sister is there, safe, as much as she can be under the circumstances. “Bethany,” you say, retreating from her hug, “Mother’s gone. I couldn’t--”

Your face burns, but there’s nothing for it. In front of your sister and your lover and the mage keeping watch for templars, you start to cry. Anders looks distressed. The other mage looks away.

Bethany puts her hands on your face. “Don’t,” she whispers. “None of it is your fault, do you hear me? You did everything you could.”

You shake your head so hard that your neck pops. If you had paid _attention_ … But now Bethany is taking something from a fold of her robe, and no, “No.”

“Keep this safe for me,” she says, putting your mother’s betrothal portrait into your hands.

“We have to go back,” says the lookout.

Bethany lays a kiss on your brow. “She would forgive you,” she whispers.

You’re not sure about that, but Bethany’s forgiveness is a relief on its own. You clutch her hand. “Wait. Bethany, wait, you could run right now.” You would hold off any pursuit. You’d bring these tunnels down on their heads, no magic required. You’d die happy if it means she’s free.

“And leave you alone in Kirkwall? Never.” She smiles. When you were children you smiled like that at her, made it an adventure every time you had to move, never (you thought) allowed her to know how present the danger was. You lied, and you meant it.

The lookout makes an urgent noise and Bethany presses your hand once more, and goes back to her prison. You watch until she’s gone, until the torch starts to gutter, until Anders says your name, and then you put your hand in his and you go back to your quiet house, where you put your mother’s portrait in the library, next to the woman whose name you’ll never know.


End file.
